“I’ve always been fascinated by the picaresque. That’s part of the Chicago tradition: to love our gangsters and con men, the bunko artists and so forth.” —David Mamet

David Mamet was born in Chicago, raised in Chicago, and began his theater career in Chicago. He spent his early years in and around a city known for gangsters and political corruption, but also for its no-nonsense sensibility and blue collar work ethic. Over the course of his youth and young adulthood, Chicago began to shift from a blue to white collar town, as the meatpacking and steel industries moved out and were replaced by finance, tourism, and the service sector. Urban renewal programs built up the Chi-town skyline and turned rundown areas like Lincoln Park into
clean, pleasant neighborhoods for the incoming bourgeoisie. 

Mamet—born into a middle class, assimilated, secular Jewish family—was in love with the Chicago of old, of literature and myths, and did his best to live there. As a teenager in the ’60s, Mamet would dress up and wander the town until he found an empty ballroom where he could sit in the dark, playing the piano. A Mamet biographer describes the playwright at 25, wearing a long coat and scarf, smoking cigars and playing pool “like a 1930s author.” When he wasn’t making theater with St. Nicholas Theater Company, (named after Nicholas of Maya, Patron Saint of mountebanks and prostitutes) or working one of many odd jobs, Mamet spent his time wandering around the city with a spiral notebook, recording bits of conversation in ramshackle bars, gyms, old Jewish bathhouses, and junk shops. One junk shop on the North Side he frequented almost daily. It was the location for an ongoing poker game, played every day from noon to eight. The players distrusted Mamet at first, and wouldn’t let him join the game until they discovered a mutual connection: the Pontiac Correctional Center, where Mamet taught and many of the men had served time. This earned him a spot at the table and the nickname Teach. The shop and its hardscrabble clientele provided inspiration for American Buffalo.

Of all that Mamet took from his Chicago upbringing, one element that stands out is his sense of writing as a blue collar trade. According to him, New York writers ask, “What does life mean?” while Chicago writers answer, “Who the hell cares;” countering with, “What do you do?”.
This attitude informs Mamet’s philosophy: playwrights, directors, actors, all are tradesmen, and should learn their craft from the masters of the trade. Competency requires practice, study, and above all discipline. These ideas manifest themselves not only in the work Mamet produces, but the style of acting he teaches and the way he directs. He once made an actress repeat her entrance 30 times in rehearsal, forcing her to eliminate any embellishment or interpretation through repetition. 

Mamet’s Chicago was a Chicago as it might have been, or as he thought it should be, regardless of what the city was becoming.

As Chicago changed around him, Mamet embodied his idea of it—tailoring the
way he dressed, the company he kept, the work he produced, and the way he produced it to this idea of the city. It informed his work, his career, and
certainly American Buffalo. @#!